What is going on with Adobe and Canon? (And concern about the quality of Adobe’s profiling)
There’s something going on with Adobe and Canon regarding Lightroom and Camera RAW that I am a bit confused about. So, basically, over the past little while, Adobe have stopped supporting camera matching profiles for Canon cameras. There have now been around 10 models that Adobe hasn’t released camera matching profiles for. I did some research on this, and apparently a post (now deleted) on an Adobe forum over a year ago (from an Adobe rep), claimed that they were having issues with the CR3 format, but frankly, I don’t buy this, especially as over a year has passed.
The file format should have nothing to do with the colour profiles. As far as I’m aware, these are entirely an Adobe thing, and are not supplied by the manufacturer. Given the size and resources of Adobe, surely it’s not that hard to make a colour profile. I can’t understand what technical reason there might be as to why they can’t do this, or why the .CR3 format would be the issue.
Moreover, their profiling lately has been awful. Sony files are nothing like what they should be, either using the camera matching Sony profiles, or the Adobe colour profiles. Canon cameras had been relatively well-matched until recently, but now they’re considerably off too. This started with the D90 and Eos RP, but now the R5 and R6 are out these don’t have camera matching profiles either.
Over the years there are many cameras that Adobe doesn’t supply profiles for, and certain models have slipped through the cracks before, but to stop producing profiles for the market leader is a bit odd. If this is an inter-company standoff over whos fault it is, maye they should think of the consumers and just solve it.
Having to use the Adobe profiles (adobe colour etc) is not good enough if you want to have reasonable accuracy to your camera’s intended colours.
Adobe profiles are designed to create a generalised look that reasonably matches across cameras. But one of the big things about using different cameras is the colour of said cameras. Users may be missing out on specific nuances of their chosen camera brands by using the generic profiles, and as I said earlier, the calibration on some cameras lately has been less than stellar.
I doubt that there is anything nefarious going on here or that there's any great conspiracy. I'd say it's just been pushed to the bottom of the priorities list and has been forgotten about. Lately I feel that Adobe have been too busy coming up with new features to justify the subscription, that they've somewhat neglected the core of the software, but I'll save that for another post.
I guess the upside here is that there is an opportunity for someone to create third-party profiles, but this isn’t the easiest thing to do. I would suggest that Canon might make their own profiles, but I can’t see that happening either as they want customers to use their (painfully slow) DPP software.
The bigger issue here is that it is a worrying trend. If Adobe feels it doesn’t have to bother to resolve these issues, then there is the possibility they could stop making profiles for other cameras too. There’s already the long standing issue with Fuji and Adobe software (And yes, there are workarounds, but that’s not the point) and now there is an issue with Canon. I would argue that there problems with Sony cameras too, given the colour claibration is quite poor depending on the model. Whatever about their specific issue with Canon, Adobe needs to get their, ahem, “stuff” together and sort out the poor quality of their calibration in general.
(And before soemone acuses me of being a Capture One shill, this has nothing to do with Capture One. I still use Ligthroom, and Photoshop and the whole Adobe Creative Suite. I still like most of their software, and so this isn’t about bashing Adobe. This is about highlighting serious issues that need to be resolved)
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